Videos: What Facebook Would Have Looked Like in the ’90s

"Twitter is about sending short text messages," video maker Jo Luijten says. "So it was easy to make up an '80s version."

"People seem to like the ‘well done’ tune" in this video that shows what Angry Birds might have looked like on an '80s PC, Luijten says. "It sounds pretty awful."

How would Google have worked two or three decades ago? "Some people complain that the modem sounds and the screen movements in this video aren’t slow enough," Luijten says. "It’s not my aim to make realistic videos because I think we don’t have the patience anymore that we had in the '80s and '90s."

"My version of Draw Something wouldn’t be as addictive as the modern version," Luijten says. "And saving drawings would only cause troubles."

If Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds were built in the days of DOS or 14.4 Kbps modems, they would’ve looked much different.

Web editor Jo Luijten has seen those ghosts of technology past, creating a series of smart, funny videos mocking up — literally and figuratively — what social networking sites and videogames might have looked like in the 1980s or ’90s. The concept, he said, sprang from watching BBC comedy Look Around You, which parodies educational TV shows of the ’70s and ’80s.

“The idea of creating a nonexistent world in the past intrigued me,” Luijten said in an e-mail to Wired.

Each video functions as a comment on how far internet culture has come in the last two decades (Netscape Navigator, what up?!). They also offer nice little nostalgia trip for anybody old enough to remember the days when one had to insert a new floppy disk to continue playing a videogame.

Luijten’s personal favorite is his “If Facebook were invented in the 90s” video, visible in the gallery above along with some of his other creations. To make it, he installed an ancient version of Netscape and ran Windows 3.11. (Easter egg: The woman in the profile picture is Kinna McInroe, who played Nina in the movie Office Space.)

Creating the videos, Luijten said, made him feel like a real programmer, a pursuit he’s known he was terrible at since childhood. When he was 11, he made a drawing program for blind people — they could hear the cursor’s position based on tones produced as the mouse moved.

It was a disaster.

“I truly believed that I programmed a true magnum opus,” said Luijten, 33, who lives in The Netherlands. “My friends laughed their ass off when they saw [it].”